


Gloves VS Mittens

by OrangeOctopi7



Series: Forduary 2020 [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Creation, Forduary 2020, Gen, it's just fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:41:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22576489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrangeOctopi7/pseuds/OrangeOctopi7
Summary: For most people, it’s just a matter of preference. But for Stanford, just having a choice at all was something he rarely had...
Series: Forduary 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1624426
Comments: 8
Kudos: 75





	Gloves VS Mittens

When Ford was four years old, he first started taking notice of the fact that his hands were not normal. It started with a Hanukkah gift from a distant aunt: a pair of gloves for Stan, and a pair of mittens for himself. The two of them were so used to getting the exact same of everything that it immediately struck them as odd.

"Hey Dad, how come mine are different?" Ford asked.

"Because they don't  _ make _ six-fingered gloves." Filbrick grunted.

"Why not?"

"Because normal people don't  _ have _ six fingers. Haven't you noticed?"

Caryn smacked her husband with her magazine. " _ Dear _ !"

"What? If he hasn't already figured it out--"

"He's  _ four _ , Filbrick."

"He's gonna have to know sooner or later! Coddling him ain't doin' him any favors. The world's not kind to what's different, so we may as well prepare him now!"

"I'm not…  _ normal _ ?" Ford asked his parents. He wasn't quite sure what to do with this information.

"Nope." Filbrick replied bluntly.

"Oh who wants to be  _ normal _ , anyway? Normal's  _ boring _ . You're  _ special _ ." Caryn took her son into her arms and kissed his forehead. “Now go outside and play with your brother."

While Stanford took his mother's words to heart, he soon found that being special had little to no practical benefits. Sure, it was nice to have something of his own for once, but Ford soon realized that while Stanley could use his mittens if he wanted, Ford couldn't use his brother's gloves. Not that Stan would ever want to use the mittens. They limited his dexterity to the point where it was hard to make a snowball, or even do something as simple as point.

"It's not fair!" He complained to Stan as he struggled to draw a face on the snowman they were working on. "It's like trying to do everything with a sock puppet on each hand!"

"It can't be all bad." Stan reasoned. "Plenty of people wear mittens, right?" 

"I guess so…" Ford remembered quite a few Christmas decorations with people wearing mittens, and he'd seen a few wearing them out and about the city.

Stan grabbed one hand and held it up, looking at it more closely. "I bet all your fingers are warmer, bundled together like that!"

"But it's hard to zip up my coat, so I get cold anyway." Ford mumbled.

"I'll help you zip it up!" Stan promised.

  
  


* * *

As the years passed, Stanford found another advantage to wearing mittens: nobody could tell he was a freak if they couldn't see his extra fingers. Sure, it didn't fool the people who already knew him, but it was nice to be able to pretend he was normal when they went up to New York City to go shopping. 

As for the dexterity problem, most of the time he'd just have to ask Stanley to do whatever it was for him. If he got tired of that, or if it simply wasn't an option (like during a snowball fight between the two brothers) he'd just take his mittens off. Sure, it was icy cold, and Ma always scolded him if she caught him, but that was a small price to pay for a good snowball.

Ford found he didn't mind wearing mittens all the time, until he started highschool chemistry class.

* * *

Ford was so excited to start his first real chemistry lab. He'd been doing his own chemical experiments with a chemistry set he got for his birthday when he turned 12, but the school chemistry lab had so much more to offer him! Actual Bunsen burners, more than one beaker and three test tubes, and best of all-- a variety of chemicals much wider than what he could find in his family home!

"Now, before we start, I'm going to go around and make sure everyone has all their safety equipment on properly. Make sure you've got your goggles on over your  _ eyes _ not your forehead, and your gloves on your  _ hands _ not in your pocket." Their teacher, an easily distracted middle-aged man, made his way around the room, checking each group. "Oh, right…" he paused when he came to the Pines twins. Stan had on his gloves and goggles (onto which he had drawn googly eyes with a wet-erase marker). Ford had on his goggles, but…

"I don't need gloves." Ford insisted. "I've never used them with my chemistry set at home."

"Yeah!" Stan agreed, "We took apart a car battery one time and didn't get any chemical burns!"

The teacher blanched at this revelation, and he opened up a supply closet at the back of the room. After some digging, he pulled out a pair of sturdy work gloves that looked like they were meant for a giant.

"Here," he tossed them to Ford, "These should be big enough. You'll just have to fit two fingers into one hole."

Ford grumbled as he pulled the gloves on. After some experimentation he found that sticking his second and third fingers together was the least uncomfortable arrangement, but the glove was still too bulky and awkward. He kept on pouring too much acid into the solution and completely missing the titration point. 

Relying on Stan to do it didn't yield much better results, as his brother was too impatient, and kept on pouring the acid too fast, once again missing the titration point. Finally, when the teacher was distracted by other students, Ford just took the gloves off. Then he got it first try.

This ended up being the pattern for Ford's chemistry labs throughout the rest of his highschool years. Fumble through the lab until the teacher's back was turned, and then strip the oversized gloves off. He was extra careful, and never got anything on him that could do any real harm. One time he did get a bit of copper nitrate on his skin, but all that it did was make his hands dry and itchy.

* * *

When Ford started college at Backupsmore University, he quickly realized he wouldn't be able to just pull an awkwardly large glove off when the teacher wasn't looking. The class size was much too small. What's more the TA overseeing their lab, a young man by the name of McGucket, was clearly a sharp and observant individual.

"Hmm, obviously this ain't gonna work." He observed as he passed out supplies to Ford's table. "I think y'should be fine fer now, we're only working with acetic acid today, but that ain't gonna be the case fer the whole semester. You got a free hour after lab?"

"Y-yes." 

"Great! Meet me in the Grad-lab, we'll make ya a special custom pair!"

"What--really!?"

"Sure! We don't want you messin' around in the chem lab with no gloves on, but messin' around with gloves that don't fit right is even worse!"

Ford finished his first lab with no trouble. In fact, he finished early, so he cleaned up his things and headed to the Grad-lab, just down the hall from his own classroom, and waited. All the graduate students there ignored him, too caught up in their own studies to even notice a lowly undergrad.

After several minutes, McGucket entered. "Alright, this is gonna take a while, you sure you got time?"

"This is my last class of the day."

"Perfect. Now come over here and we'll get started." The grad student led Ford back to a table with many five-gallon buckets. He pried the lid off of one, revealing its dark blue, slimy contents. "This here's the silicone-rubber I use t'make molds fer my machine parts. If'n ya jus' stick yer hand in here and let it gel, it should make a nice glove, like a second skin!"

"You want me to stick my hand… in  _ that _ ?" Ford asked incredulously.

"Pshaw, it ain't that bad!" McGucket assured him. "It's like… well, y'ever stuck her hand in pig slop?"

" _ No. _ " Ford said slowly, his eye twitching just a bit at the thought.

"Oh, well nevermind then. I guess you can jus' drop outta chemistry 112"

Ford sighed and plunged his hands down into the bucket. It  _ was  _ pretty gross, but he got used to the slimy sensation after a few minutes. He slowly pulled his hands out, letting the viscous fluid slide off his fingers. 

"How long does this take to dry?"

"Gel." McGucket corrected. "First layer'll probably take 'bout half an hour. It goes faster if'n ya use a settin' spray, bit that tends t'irritate the skin."

" _ First  _ layer? How many layers will it take?"

"Only two. Ya want it thick 'nuff it'll protect yer skin, but thin 'nuff that it's flexible an’ peels off easy."

"So I'm just supposed to stand here for a whole hour? What am I supposed to  _ do _ for all this time? I-I've got homework!"

"Well, I'll pull ya up a chair." McGucket rolled over a chair for him and opened his backpack. "An' maybe I can help ya with yer homework."

They sat there for an hour, McGucket reading Ford's textbooks and Ford asking questions about the material. The grad student was impressed with the workload this freshman had taken on.

"I  _ wanted  _ to go to West Coast Tech, but  _ that _ didn't work out." Ford explained bitterly. "So I'm going to have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously by the scientific community."

"Believe me, I know the feelin'." McGucket nodded. "Most folks don't take a roboticist from the Tennessee hills seriously either. But there's some perks to attendin' a smaller University. The dean lets us do whatever we want! I've built lots o' robots I never woulda gotten away with at MIT."

"I suppose that's true." Ford admitted. "I'm interested in anomalies and cryptozoology. At West Coast Tech, I probably wouldn't be able to study those."

The hour passed more quickly than Ford expected. When he pulled the gloves off, they turned inside out, showing all the wrinkles and ridges of his skin in relief. He liked it. It was much more personal than some disposable pair.

“I’m sorry for complaining so much at the start. What you’ve done for me is  _ incredibly  _ generous. Thank you.” Ford said sincerely.

“Think nothin’ of it!” McGucket assured him with a friendly smile. “Can’t ‘spect you to go through the whole class without proper gloves.”

“No, really, you don’t know how much this means to me.”

“Well, I s’pose not. But I imagine ya don’t get somethin’ as simple as a pair o’ gloves offen.”

“N-no.” Ford instinctively hid his hand behind his back.

“Well now, ain’t nothin’ to hide!” McGucket elbowed him. “You could have two heads, fer all I care, with how well you un’erstand superconductors!” He waved goodbye as they exited the lab. “See ya in class on Wednesday!”

Ford found he gained more than just a new pair of gloves that day.

* * *

The custom gloves were nice, but they didn’t last more than a couple of months before they needed to be replaced again. He spent a lot of time in the Grad-lab talking to Fiddleford over the next few years. By the time graduation rolled around, Ford had learned to make the silicone-rubber compound himself. It was something he continued to use as he moved out to Gravity Falls. Being able to make his own gloves was so convenient! After all these years of being stuck with ill-fitting gloves, or no gloves at all, he’d never really realized how useful they were. And now he could have them whenever he wanted! As time went by, he improved upon the original silicone-rubber formula, making the gloves more durable and long-lasting. 

As he got used to wearing gloves while he worked, the fact that he didn’t have winter gloves became more and more annoying. It was easy to ignore at Backusmore, where it rarely snowed and stayed warm for most of the year. But Oregon was farther north, and Gravity Falls was in the middle of the temperate rainforest. It snowed all winter long. It was so frustrating when he encountered an anomaly out in the snow and couldn’t hold his pen properly to take notes in his journal, either because of his mittens, or because his hands were too cold and numb from  _ not wearing _ his mittens.

Oh well. As irritating as it was, he was used to it by now.

* * *

Out in the multiverse, just finding something to keep himself warm at all could be a struggle. Many of the dimensions he visited didn’t have human inhabitants, so finding something to wear on his hands at all was an impossible ask. Ford learned to wrap strips of cloth around his hands and fingers to keep them warm. It worked pretty well, although it took a lot longer to wrap the cloth in such a way that he could still move his fingers individually than it would to simply slip on a glove.

Of course, sometimes he got lucky. When he became ruler of the Finger Dimension, for instance, the people had made him a pair of silk, fur-lined gloves. They were very nice, but obviously more for fashion rather than function. He ended up trading them away for some tools shortly after he was banished by the Finger Dimension’s new ruler. 

But Stanford had bigger things to worry about than the comfort of his hands in his interdimensional travels. 

* * *

Stanley found the gloves while he was digging around the portal’s control console, looking for any clues as to how to get the thing working again. It was like a punch to the gut, but really, finding  _ anything  _ of Ford’s was like a punch to the gut. Stan still remembered that first Hanukkah when he’d gotten a pair of gloves, and Ford got a pair of mittens. He still remembered all the awkward times in their chemistry class where he’d had to do all the fine measurements even though he was terrible at it, until the teacher looked away long enough for Ford to take the oversized gloves off. He was glad his brother had finally found a way to get his own pair of work gloves.

His mind wandered, unbidden, to the fact that his brother was now lost…  _ somewhere…  _ without them. Without a lot of things he needed. Stan pulled on the gloves and made a fist, watching the extra pinky sleeve flop uselessly. He grimaced. _ Right. Back to work. _

* * *

When Ford turned sixty-four, he was used to wearing mittens. He’d long ago accepted that the winter months came with a loss of dexterity, and honestly, over the past nine months of sailing through arctic waters, he’d been  _ fine _ . He knew Stan had his back when he couldn’t properly wrap a finger around his blaster’s trigger. And when he knew he was going to need his blaster, he just didn’t wear them. He hadn’t gotten frostbite yet. In the middle of June, it wasn’t even worth worrying about. He wouldn’t even be thinking about it right now if it wasn’t for the birthday gift his niece had just given him.

“I noticed you weren’t wearing your mittens in a lot of the photos you sent us.” Mabel explained. “And I figured you probably have to use all your fingers for boat stuff, like tying knots, or signaling merpeople! So I made you these!” She handed him a pair of hand-knitted gloves, made up of a mix of red, blue, and green yarn.

“I wanted to send you some while you were still sailing, but I’d never knitted gloves before, so it took me a while to figure it out.”

“She went through a  _ lot  _ of yarn the last few months.” Dipper agreed. “Like, even more than usual.”

Ford slipped them on. They were a perfect fit.

“How…?”

Stan suddenly started whistling for no reason. Ford shot him a knowing look.

“What? Don’t look at me like that! So maybe I kept an old pair of your gloves while I was workin’ on the portal. Not for, like, sentimental reasons or anything. Good work gloves aren’t cheap! And it’s a good thing I  _ did  _ keep ‘em, they were the perfect model for Mabel. I just had to tell Soos where I left ‘em and asked him to send ‘em to her.”

“I-I don’t know what to say.” Ford’s voice wavered with emotion. "This is-- the fact that you put in all that time and effort, just for me-- and such a thoughtful gift! I-I've never really had a pair of winter gloves before… well, except for that pair from the Finger Dimension, and those were more ceremonial than anything else."

"So you like them?" Mabel asked, eyes bright.

"I absolutely love them. They're perfect!" He hugged her. "Thank you!" He turned to Stan. "Thank both of you!"

"Eh, I didn't do anything." Stan rubbed the back of his neck, embarrassed.

"You provided the model. I have you to thank for the fact that they fit so well."

"I have an idea, if you want to test them out now." Dipper suggested. "Remember that snow spell we tested out last week?"

"Oh, right! Great idea, my boy!"

  
"Yeah, just test it  _ outside _ this time, so Soos doesn't have to mop up after you again." Stan advised.


End file.
